Friday, February 29, 2008

Whilst the world held a HarryFest to celebrate his handling of a machine gun (allegedly firing at Terry Taliban") and calling in USAF F 15's to bomb the shit out of an unseen enemy, Richard Norton Taylor in the Guradian reported that ...

Court gags ex-SAS man who made torture claims

Apparently not only were the Press prevented by a court order from reporting a court martial of six SAS soldiers charged with a conspiracy to "defraud of a value of about £3,000". Ben Griffin a former SAS soldier was served with a high court order. This order ( breach of which is contempt of Court) prevents hime from any further comment about how hundreds of Iraqis and Afghans captured by British and American special forces were rendered to prisons where they faced torture.

Griffin, 29, left the British army in 2005 after three months in Baghdad, saying he disagreed with the "illegal" tactics of US troops.

He told a press conference hosted by the Stop the War Coalition this week that individuals detained by SAS troops in a joint UK-US special forces taskforce had ended up in interrogation centres in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Guantánamo Bay.

Referring to the government's admission that two US rendition flights containing terror suspects had landed at the British territory of Diego Garcia, Griffin said the use of British territory and airspace "pales into insignificance in light of the fact that it has been British soldiers detaining the victims of extraordinary rendition in the first place".

The Ministry of Defence said it did not comment on special forces' activities.

'I didn't join the British Army to conduct American foreign policy' by Sean Rayment

He said: "I saw a lot of things in Baghdad that were illegal or just wrong. I knew, so others must have known, that this was not the way to conduct operations if you wanted to win the hearts and minds of the local population." ....he believes that the reputation of the Army has been damaged by its association with the American forces.